A student from California accused famous Chinese video service app TikTok of collecting her personnel data and sending that to the servers in China and using her videos for advertisement.
In the lawsuit filed by Misty Hong in the Northern District of California, she says “TikTok clandestinely has vacuumed up and transferred to servers in China vast quantities of private and personally-identifiable user data.” Her lawyer called it a privacy breach by the owner of application ByteDance’s, as used the personal data commercially without her consent.
TikTok, which ranked top downloaded application in the year 2019, has been under fire for a very long time. Last month United State opened national security investigation into TikTok owner ByteDance’s acquisition of Musical.ly. The investigation also included the expected data sharing by TikTok to its home country.
In another event, the suspension of the account of New Jersey TikToker Feroza Aziz caused rage against the application. The company banned her profile for posting videos on the oppression of Muslims in China.
In the case of Misty Hong, Tiktok used a personal video to make money, in the filling her lawyers said “TikTok’s lighthearted fun comes at a heavy cost,”, “TikTok unjustly profits from its secret harvesting of private and personally-identifiable user data by, among other things, using such data to derive vast targeted-advertising revenues and profits.”
Misty Hong said that TikTok stole her all the videos, which even includes the videos that she created but did not post online.
The case filed by Misty Hong in court is on behalf of 110 million users of TikTok in the United States. TikTok has not given any response to the petition yet. If it does TechJuice will share it with you
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